I’m new to this blogging thing, but lately I’ve been really interested in “becoming a cloud.” I’ve always been a nerd, but have been somewhat opposed to trends. But this is the way the world is going. Everything is becoming connected. It accelerates every day. Twitter, for example, is seeing membership increase percentages in the thousands. So, to join in, and take full advantage of the capabilites of this new Web 2.0 experience, I’d like to get all of my “stuff” out on the net. This seems convenient for a number of reasons. 1) If you’re stuff is on the net, you’re already backed up (hopefully). I have taken some precautions and made accounts with two different companies for some things (mainly pictures and documents). 2) If you’re stuff is on the net, you don’t need to take it with you. If I have a bunch of pictures I want somebody to check out, I have them take a look at my Picasa. Want to see my videos? Go to Youtube. My friends are on Facebook and MySpace. I join the world on Twitter. I read the news on Digg or Reddit or Stumbleupon or /…. ๐
Computing is changing. Web browsers are the new operating systems. More and more, we’ll see OS developers shy away from bloatware and extra features to a more minimalist approach, focusing on three main things: speed, security and a nice web browser. Competition for the future computer user will be driven by getting him/her a simple, secure, and feature-rich web browser with which to view the world. Why worry about a nice software package when I can go to the web for anything I need already? Half a G for MS Office you say? How about I save that money, time installing, AND hard drive space and just go to docs.google.com? Outlook? Gmail. Paint, Photoshop? Picnik.com Remember the days of Microsoft Encarta? HA! Yea, like we need THAT anymore. Want some music? Create your own stations at Pandora. These are all free! And keep in mind, you’ll never get a message saying “You’re program is out of date.” Nice. And it keeps getting better. And I hope you don’t think these options are the only or last in this movement. This is just a (very) quick run through of a few of the programs I use.
Listen, I’d consider myself a pretty smart guy. I have this vision of where the internet is going, and I think it’s pretty phenomenal. But I’m nowhere NEAR the forefront of this thing. Like I said earlier, I’m just now giving in to some of it. Why didn’t I before? Laziness. An unwillingness to subject myself to the complexities of owning 70 different accounts for different services. I still don’t like the idea. I’m very OCD when it comes to my name being “out there.” Changing my e-mail address was what started it all. As soon as I did, I realized I knew EXACTLY who has that address, and I started keeping track of who I gave it to. This empowered me to give it out a little more. I use that one e-mail address for all the services I WANT, and everybody else gets a fake. This demonstrates one of the pitfalls of the massive internet community. Everybody wants you to sign up with them. Give them your e-mail and set a password and you can do what you want. Until then, you’re window shopping. I’ve done a little reading and this too seems to be an issue soon to be dealt with. With sites like OpenID, I soon won’t have to go through this hullabaloo. I create an ID, pass it to a site, and I’m in. No muss, no fuss, I go where I want and I do what I want. As soon as ideas like this and others catch on a little more, we’ll definitely be seeing more and more people enjoy the freedom and power of the web. They have to, cuz I said so.
One more thing. I’ve got one of these cool jump drives that has the software loaded on it. I added two browsers: Opera and Firefox. I wish they were a little more up-to-date and that there was a Google Chrome for this thing, but this is one of the coolest ideas. As I use one of these two to browse the web, my session is on my jump drive and NOT my hard drive. This means when I go to school or work, my internet goes with me. All my open tabs are open. My bookmarks are there. My e-mail and RSS readers are set up. What was that page I was at yesterday? Check my history. It’s really cool. I like it a lot.
Anyway, that’s it for a first blog. I gotta cut this thing off somewhere. I only planned to write a sentence or two. As a disclaimer, I’d like to say that is my first blog. I don’t typically type this much out to the world. Hell, on most sites with profiles where I’m asked “about me,” I usually put “I’ll fill this in later.” So, you’ll have to excuse me if I haven’t quite chosen my blogging voice. I will after I give myself some feedback later.
So, as a developer, in the spirit of all that is programming, I say:
Hello, World!
Later,
David